Blog posts

Escalating its response to the processor vulnerabilities revealed recently, Apple has made iOS 11.2.2 available for the iPhone and iPad, and has issued a supplementary security update for macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 to further deal with the "Meltdown" attack vector and the "Spectre" vulnerability for the first time.

The first augmented-reality glasses with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant will be shown next week at CES in Las Vegas -- manufactured by a 75-employee company rather than the e-commerce giant’s growing devices division. Vuzix Corp. will show off a pair of smart glasses that can talk to Amazon.com Inc.’s voice-activated digital assistant and display information to the wearer’s field of view, Vuzix Chief Executive Officer Paul Travers said in an interview.

There may be a reason why that ol’ “Facebook is listening to you talk” conspiracy theory refuses to die – and not just because Facebook’s ad technology has gotten so good, it’s downright creepy. As it turns out, some apps are actually listening. Well, kind of! According to a recent report from The NYT, a number of apps using software from a company called Alphonso use the smartphone’s microphone to listen for audio signals in TV ads and programs, then sometimes even connect that data with places you visit or the movies you go see.

It appears that YouTube is more responsible for the first crisis of the year on its video platform than was initially thought.
Yesterday, the internet was rightly outraged by news that YouTube star Logan Paul, who has 15 million subscribers and is part of YouTube’s Red subscription service, posted and later deleted a video that included extensive footage of a suicide victim filmed at Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’.

Lesser-known Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak recently sat down with Reddit for a video interview, and a more traditional AMA. Among the nuggets of wisdom: the Apple Watch lineup is “too complicated”, and Apple’s garage origins is partly a myth. There’s a few good, hard-hitting questions in the AMA that Wozniak took the time to answer.

HQ Trivia is letting Android users pre-register for the live-streamed trivia game built by the makers of Vine, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. Pre-registering means you’ll get notified the moment HQ Trivia is available for download. HQ, which opened up pre-registration on December 24, had previously marketed its Android app as being available “this Christmas.” To me, that means it was supposed to be available by Christmas. But apparently that’s not what HQ Trivia meant.

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden is among the backers of a new surveillance app that helps guard against computer hijackings. Haven is an open source app that will run on any Android phone, particularly inexpensive and older devices. It operates like a surveillance system, using the device’s camera, audio recording capability and even accelerometer to detect movement and notify a user.

Netflix had a pretty good year by very Netflix-y standards: it added a ton of subscribers; its international growth plans seem to be playing out as hoped; it cleaned up in the Golden Globe nominations, and users are watching a ton of Netflix. While the company has continued to show growth with its existing strategy — investing a ton in its original content strategy in the hope that it’ll convert Emmy and Grammy awards into subscribers — it’s going to get more expensive.

Apple has confirmed its plan to acquire the music-discovery service Shazam. In a statement to Fortune, an Apple spokesperson said that the tech giant is “thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple.” While the Apple spokesperson didn’t share terms of the deal, the statement did say that “Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit,” suggesting the service could be integrated into Apple’s own music streaming app.

Apple is aggressively scheduling a phase-out of music downloads from the iTunes Store, according to multiple sources tied into the platform or working at the company itself. The termination has been in motion since 2016, when sources first lipped the story to Digital Music News. At that stage, the plan was to sunset music downloads ‘within 2 years’. Now, plummeting download sales may be creating pressure to make good on that aggressive schedule.